last year got tired / annoyed with how long it took to be able to cross the road (St Colme St / Ainslie Place), due to all the rat-running traffic between Queensferry Rd and Queen St (seems mental that volume is allowed, even HGVs).
Even with a small kid in tow, can easily stand 3 or 4 mins in the rain until someone decides to let you cross. There’s quite a few nurseries close by, so often see lots of prams/buggies waiting on both sides.
So I googled how to have a junction assessed for a ped crossing of some sort. Seems you just ask and they will eventually get round to assessing it. The criteria they use is "a nationally recognised value that indicates the number of passing vehicles and crossing pedestrians. Pedestrian and vehicle counts are taken over the peak hours of a week day, from 7am to 10am and 3pm to 6pm, and avoiding school holidays or any other factors which might cause an abnormal result.
This base PV2 value is then adjusted to take account of local factors such as the age of those crossing, the composition and speed of passing traffic, the road width, the number of pedestrian accidents and the presence of nearby trip attractors such as schools, doctors’ surgeries, shops etc.
A location with an adjusted PV2 value of 1 or higher (2 or higher on a dual carriageway) would be considered for a puffin crossing, locations with a value of 0.3 or higher would be considered for a suite of measures that includes a zebra crossing, refuge island or pavement build-outs.".
Turns out that the result of the crossing assessment on St Colme St / Ainslie Place resulted in an adjusted PV2 value of 6.188 – yay ! “It is therefore proposed to provide a signalised pedestrian crossing facility at this location”. I was looking out for the assessment, as I had MiniMcR’s nursery lined up to take multiple trips over that crossing – seems they weren’t needed.
Of course this is CEC and pedestrians, so naturally there is some sobering bad news which will bring reality back into sharp focus. There are 35 locations in the queue ahead and they have a budget to be able to build 10 – 12 / year, so have a full workload until end of 23/24 financial year.
So looking forward to being able to cross safely sometime in 2025.
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